A casino isn't a good comparison. It's extremely easy to predict what will happen on any given day. The casino will have good weather and very rarely have a rainy day. Unpredictable solar flares won't cause a casino to suddenly lose money for quite a long time.
Also, it's not difficult to learn the complete set of casino game rules and understand how the system makes sure things are stacked to work so the weather stays nice.
OTOH, modeling the weather accurately won't happen because there are too many cumulative effects that shove the climate very rapidly into (for example) an Ice Age.
Also, the magnetic field of the Earth weakens, goes away, and flips around every once in a while which destroys any model that doesn't know every rule about how that works.
In fact, to get a fairly accurate model of the Earth's climate and what will cause X to happen in year XXXX, we'd need a model pretty close to the size of Earth itself.
No matter how many 'data points' we have, we still won't be able to make accurate predictions, much less blame specific human influences. (Barring a large scale nuclear war).
Weather 7 days in the future can't be predicted accurately.
We can't even predict which direction a hurricane will turn on a day to day basis.
Their models are limited to facts that these people already believe so it's no surprise their results support those same beliefs.
Anybody who has read Clarke's book can see for themselves that he is not some raving madman. He's a professional who has made a career out of imagining the worst, figuring out who's likely to do bad things, and then trying to get others to do what's necessary to prevent the bad things or capture/arrest/kill the bad people. His failure, if you can call it that, is that he was unable to get the current US President to take al Qaeda and the threat of International Terror seriously until after 9/11, and even then, the President was more worried about Saddam Hussein and Iraq than he was about Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.
It's a testament to the character of that man in that he was the first person to come forward and publicly apologize for 9/11.
I've read the book he wrote about the events before and after (as he saw them) and have followed articles about him. I get the distinct impression that he is the type of person who has 'what if i had have done X' thoughts tormenting him quite often.
One of my boxes here is an XPPro gaming one which has every single service shut off that isn't absolutely needed to run games. I'm not in Administrator mode, there isn't telnet available, etc...
I still run a firewall seperately for this box even though the risk factor is (relatively) low that anyone will do something bad to it compared to a stock XP SP2 box.
But, I still see lots of attacks and most of them are windows related. This is the sort of thing I see several times hourly although there are many types of different Windows attacks going on all day:
Attempted Intrusion "MSSQL_Null_Packet_DoS" against your machine was detected and blocked
Intruder: 38.116.156.114(http(80))
Rarely do I see attacks in the logs directly going after my *NIX servers and Linux gaming box. The *NIX firewall logs show that the attacks on them are proportionally the same, many more Windows ones vs *NIX.
So, in my particular experience here, even if hypothetically Windows has better security, Windows is in much more danger of being broken into since Windows 'Houses' are what the burglars prefer at least 10-1.
I kinda wondered why they weren't a unified device. now I wonder if my perception was wrong...
It's rather vague in the story(s). Even Arthur wasn't quite sure or even cared. I just happened to be reading through The Utimate Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy recently and flipping back through the book I see a second reference to the device. (The first one being before Earth was destroyed).
"Looking over his shoulder Arthur saw that he was twiddling with knobs on a small black box. Ford had already introduced this box to Arthur as a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic, but Arthur had merely nodded absently and not pursued the matter."
"For now, it remains an accessory or luxury item."
A similar system is also used on the so-called 'invisible fleet' of trucks that move government equipment & radioactive/hazardous materials on our roads.
It broadcasts all sorts of information including speed & if someone attempts to open the cargo area.
The vehicles can also be shut down remotely.
Look for the device when you see sort of plain looking 18-wheelers driving past you on national highways. There will be a white dome attached to the roof of the cab on many of them.
The most likely place you'll see them would probably be around Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada.
Why don't they make GPS manditory for all cars, incorporate it with the police, and then police can do a search for your car if its stolen?
a) It's not cheap. It'll be another burden on people who don't have a lot of money.
b) It'll be a way for the police to cheaply send out speeding tickets by mail. (And yes, they will try that.)
c) People should protect their own vehicles and insurance also covers theft. IMO, the police should be out protecting the public from physical threats and home invasion instead of spending a large amount of their time chasing down stolen cars.
"it looks like the Thumb has become a ring on his finger. I don't think it was ever stated in the books that it was not a ring. I may be wrong though"
It was a box and it had knobs. At one point, Ford Prefect kept messing with it when he ended up on Earth a few million years in the past and was trying to find signals.
It was also referred to as a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic.
"I thought the whole "brain the size of a planet" thing was more like a metaphor for his immense intellect, not just a huge head"
When I first read the HGTTG stories, I thought the constant reminders that he had a brain that specific size would end up with a plot 'surprise' that Marvin was in fact the computer trying to figure out the question that results in the answer 42.
After all, no other computers in the story were described as that size except for Earth itself.
Another strange thing: Marvin in fact did know the Ultimate Question. He was brilliant enough to retrieve it from Arthur's brain but was completely ignored when he mentioned that fact.
It's not a matter of having to be told what the problem is. It's a matter of Kia stupidly turning on the "Check Engine" light for a loose gas cap in the first place. That light stays on until you take it in, whether or not you know whats going on, and they still charge you out the ass.
Maybe Kia pays it's engineers to not think of having a loose gas cap make the low gas indicator blink quickly instead of the "Check Wallet" light.
The explanation is in fucking license.txt. Read it yourself. Are you so fucking thick that they have to explain to you more than once that they charge per PC rather than per head? How many fucking ways can one put it?!
Jesus, you fucking moron, pull your head out of your ass. PLEASE.
Actually, AC, the explanation is in my post.
It was one PC. It happened to be dual-boot Win32/Linux.
It was not 2 seperate PCs. And, again, I did pay for the extra license for that same PC.
Now enter people like you: A tiny minority. You don't realize that the way things are done now actually benefit more people than if they did it the other way around. Don't you realize that there are more people in this world than yourself?
Yes, I'm in a tiny minority group as far as dual boot.
But, I'm also in the tiny minority group that pays for shareware & similar software.
My frustration with this issue has more to do with the fact that Opera had a 'you bought it, we have your money, too bad' attitude. They gave me no explanation and nothing within a million miles of 'sorry, but we have to because of [whatever]'.
For the record, I did pay for the extra license. Opera saved me a lot of time and I'm more than willing to send money to companies that have helpful software.
OTOH, Opera didn't deal with the situation well and as a result, I now recommend Mozilla. This costs Opera quite a bit of money.
I realize that I'm being 'pissy' about it, but I do feel that Opera didn't give a damn about my situation at all once they had my money.
..because even if they don't get enough paying customers they have more money again to continue developing the browser with the world's best user interface!
They won't continue getting paying customers by doing stupid stuff like charging extra for people with dual-boot systems.
That happened to me. I purchased Opera because it saved me a lot of time at work (groupmarks, tabbed browsing). Then, when I couldn't get the serial code I purchased working on the Linux partition, they informed me that I'd have to pay extra to get a Linux serial number.
In light of that experience, and especially now that Mozilla has both of those features, I don't recommend Opera to anyone.
If the Opera people can't be extra nice to the (maybe) 1% of people who actually buy it instead of leaving it with ads or entering a serial number found on the internet, they don't have their priorities straight..
Yes, there was an installer, but they didn't put it at the root of the directory. Small token of appreciation, but they said it was to show their support of Linux this time around.
It is in the root of the cdrom directory.
I have had the CD's since November, 2002 and just checked.
He confronted her and she confessed to using his account. She was an experienced typist and claimed that she could figure out what he was typing by listening to the keystrokes a few times.
I had a friend in high school that claimed he could translate tty-38 typing even with the high background noise level those machines made in the computing rooms.
He demonstrated this by falsely calling in for support and writing down username/password combinations when the techs would show up and use their remote passwords. He'd then gain access to those accounts and snoop around for access to other accounts & systems. We watched him do it. Unless he was tricking us by using user/passwords he already knew, he really could hear it.
We thought he was really cool until he gained accessed to something he shouldn't and MIB came for him.
"At the Baja Beach Club, Tuesdays are VeriChip implantation days. Stop in and a ''nurse'' -- the club's word -- uses a syringe to inject a VeriChip capsule under your skin.."
Does this "nurse" know much about "HIV" & "Hepatitis"?
Re:Not solution to slashdot effect, but still grea
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yes, but the thing that you are not considering is that probably 75% the slashdot effect is just people looking at the link for about 5 seconds, and then closing the page and moving on the the next story.
The other 25% is us looking at a page for 5 seconds and then replying because as everyone knows here, it's much more entertaining to reply without RTFA.
People read blogs because it either a.) Validates their thinking (my guess: 95%), or b.) Offers an opportunity to challenge their current ways of thinking, and an avenue to respond to the opportunity (again my guess: less than 5%). Remember, blogs are usually heavily biased, so the people that read the blogs often enough to see every post probably agree with the author. Are not both stories and comments on/. heavily biased?
Actually, there's also the silent majority to be taken into account also.
There's always a bunch of people who just like to watch out of curiosity. Or, the site keeps up on things that they are interested in. Most people aren't bold, so they don't post.
It would be interesting to see the # of people who read replies vs the # of people who read AND reply.
If the ratio is anything like USENET, I would be surprised if 1 out of 100 readers post something on any given day.
Something to back that up without statistics: Notice that sites often get slashdotted and stay that way before 10 replies have been posted.
Not only that, it was the first game (or so Epic claims) to have an Linux install script right at the root of the disc, and a Penguin right alongside the Windows and Mac logo on the box. It was a small gesture, but I remember reading one of the creators saying "We thought it'd be cool."
The UT2003 disc set had the Linux client installer also.
There's a great quote from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails to the effect that he would have released a couple of more albums if it hadn't been for Doom.
I don't understand that.
After all, remix releases shouldn't take up too much time.
I have a gfx 5200 with 128 megs ram, it cant play anything with any sort of detail and I'm left scratching my head as to why they'd bother putting that much RAM on, I'd glady sacrifice 64megs of VRAM for a GPU with a little balls. I have an old 64meg Radeon VIVO that runs circles around it in many games.
It's all about fooling the average consumer by having '128' vs '64' on the box'.
They added too much ram because people tend to think that size is what matters. Since there aren't benchmarks on the box, manufacturers know that people will choose by size.
I play halo almost every other night with all my friends, we set up 2 tvs and have probably 8 people getting together to play it. We always play Capture the Flag on blood gulch and I hope they have something similar in halo 2. Plus the new guns in halo2 dont look so hot, give me the regular pistol anyday. Anyone Know why halo 2 is taking so long?
Yes. It's because they're embarrassed that most Halo players only have 8 friends.
James Bond faked fingerprints in this movie by attaching thin fake prints to his fingers. Maybe not quite possible back in the 70's but not so far-fetched today.
A lot of people were using facial lotions in the 1970's that hardened after a short while and was then peeled off so the person could clean their pores and get rid of dead skin cells. It's still in use, but it isn't the fad it was back then.
That Bond trick took into account the fact that many people of that time were familiar with the masking lotion. People who used it couldn't avoid seeing that when it was removed, a perfect impression of their facial lines were in the mask. Audiences wouldn't have to make much of a leap to understand that making an impression on the outside of such a substance would be rather easy..
That method would still work well to this day, but it relies on the person taking the prints not being there to examine the fingers themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Tell it to the casino.
A casino isn't a good comparison. It's extremely easy to predict what will happen on any given day. The casino will have good weather and very rarely have a rainy day. Unpredictable solar flares won't cause a casino to suddenly lose money for quite a long time.
Also, it's not difficult to learn the complete set of casino game rules and understand how the system makes sure things are stacked to work so the weather stays nice.
OTOH, modeling the weather accurately won't happen because there are too many cumulative effects that shove the climate very rapidly into (for example) an Ice Age. Also, the magnetic field of the Earth weakens, goes away, and flips around every once in a while which destroys any model that doesn't know every rule about how that works.
In fact, to get a fairly accurate model of the Earth's climate and what will cause X to happen in year XXXX, we'd need a model pretty close to the size of Earth itself.
Chaos is in control.
No matter how many 'data points' we have, we still won't be able to make accurate predictions, much less blame specific human influences. (Barring a large scale nuclear war).
Weather 7 days in the future can't be predicted accurately.
We can't even predict which direction a hurricane will turn on a day to day basis.
Their models are limited to facts that these people already believe so it's no surprise their results support those same beliefs.
Anybody who has read Clarke's book can see for themselves that he is not some raving madman. He's a professional who has made a career out of imagining the worst, figuring out who's likely to do bad things, and then trying to get others to do what's necessary to prevent the bad things or capture/arrest/kill the bad people. His failure, if you can call it that, is that he was unable to get the current US President to take al Qaeda and the threat of International Terror seriously until after 9/11, and even then, the President was more worried about Saddam Hussein and Iraq than he was about Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.
It's a testament to the character of that man in that he was the first person to come forward and publicly apologize for 9/11.
I've read the book he wrote about the events before and after (as he saw them) and have followed articles about him. I get the distinct impression that he is the type of person who has 'what if i had have done X' thoughts tormenting him quite often.
One of my boxes here is an XPPro gaming one which has every single service shut off that isn't absolutely needed to run games. I'm not in Administrator mode, there isn't telnet available, etc...
I still run a firewall seperately for this box even though the risk factor is (relatively) low that anyone will do something bad to it compared to a stock XP SP2 box.
But, I still see lots of attacks and most of them are windows related. This is the sort of thing I see several times hourly although there are many types of different Windows attacks going on all day:
Attempted Intrusion "MSSQL_Null_Packet_DoS" against your machine was detected and blocked Intruder: 38.116.156.114(http(80))
Rarely do I see attacks in the logs directly going after my *NIX servers and Linux gaming box. The *NIX firewall logs show that the attacks on them are proportionally the same, many more Windows ones vs *NIX.
So, in my particular experience here, even if hypothetically Windows has better security, Windows is in much more danger of being broken into since Windows 'Houses' are what the burglars prefer at least 10-1.
I kinda wondered why they weren't a unified device. now I wonder if my perception was wrong...
It's rather vague in the story(s). Even Arthur wasn't quite sure or even cared. I just happened to be reading through The Utimate Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy recently and flipping back through the book I see a second reference to the device. (The first one being before Earth was destroyed).
"Looking over his shoulder Arthur saw that he was twiddling with knobs on a small black box. Ford had already introduced this box to Arthur as a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic, but Arthur had merely nodded absently and not pursued the matter."
"For now, it remains an accessory or luxury item."
A similar system is also used on the so-called 'invisible fleet' of trucks that move government equipment & radioactive/hazardous materials on our roads.
It broadcasts all sorts of information including speed & if someone attempts to open the cargo area.
The vehicles can also be shut down remotely.
Look for the device when you see sort of plain looking 18-wheelers driving past you on national highways. There will be a white dome attached to the roof of the cab on many of them.
The most likely place you'll see them would probably be around Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada.
Why don't they make GPS manditory for all cars, incorporate it with the police, and then police can do a search for your car if its stolen?
a) It's not cheap. It'll be another burden on people who don't have a lot of money.
b) It'll be a way for the police to cheaply send out speeding tickets by mail. (And yes, they will try that.)
c) People should protect their own vehicles and insurance also covers theft. IMO, the police should be out protecting the public from physical threats and home invasion instead of spending a large amount of their time chasing down stolen cars.
"it looks like the Thumb has become a ring on his finger. I don't think it was ever stated in the books that it was not a ring. I may be wrong though"
It was a box and it had knobs. At one point, Ford Prefect kept messing with it when he ended up on Earth a few million years in the past and was trying to find signals. It was also referred to as a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic.
"I thought the whole "brain the size of a planet" thing was more like a metaphor for his immense intellect, not just a huge head"
When I first read the HGTTG stories, I thought the constant reminders that he had a brain that specific size would end up with a plot 'surprise' that Marvin was in fact the computer trying to figure out the question that results in the answer 42.
After all, no other computers in the story were described as that size except for Earth itself.
Another strange thing: Marvin in fact did know the Ultimate Question. He was brilliant enough to retrieve it from Arthur's brain but was completely ignored when he mentioned that fact.
Fox News has a wireless network?
They must. After all, they seem to get their 'facts' out of thin air.
There must be a lot of packet loss though...their news is an extreme distortion of reality.
It's not a matter of having to be told what the problem is. It's a matter of Kia stupidly turning on the "Check Engine" light for a loose gas cap in the first place. That light stays on until you take it in, whether or not you know whats going on, and they still charge you out the ass.
Maybe Kia pays it's engineers to not think of having a loose gas cap make the low gas indicator blink quickly instead of the "Check Wallet" light.
The explanation is in fucking license.txt. Read it yourself. Are you so fucking thick that they have to explain to you more than once that they charge per PC rather than per head? How many fucking ways can one put it?!
Jesus, you fucking moron, pull your head out of your ass. PLEASE.
Actually, AC, the explanation is in my post.
It was one PC. It happened to be dual-boot Win32/Linux.
It was not 2 seperate PCs. And, again, I did pay for the extra license for that same PC.
Now enter people like you: A tiny minority. You don't realize that the way things are done now actually benefit more people than if they did it the other way around. Don't you realize that there are more people in this world than yourself?
Yes, I'm in a tiny minority group as far as dual boot.
But, I'm also in the tiny minority group that pays for shareware & similar software.
My frustration with this issue has more to do with the fact that Opera had a 'you bought it, we have your money, too bad' attitude. They gave me no explanation and nothing within a million miles of 'sorry, but we have to because of [whatever]'.
For the record, I did pay for the extra license. Opera saved me a lot of time and I'm more than willing to send money to companies that have helpful software.
OTOH, Opera didn't deal with the situation well and as a result, I now recommend Mozilla. This costs Opera quite a bit of money.
I realize that I'm being 'pissy' about it, but I do feel that Opera didn't give a damn about my situation at all once they had my money.
..because even if they don't get enough paying customers they have more money again to continue developing the browser with the world's best user interface!
They won't continue getting paying customers by doing stupid stuff like charging extra for people with dual-boot systems.
That happened to me. I purchased Opera because it saved me a lot of time at work (groupmarks, tabbed browsing). Then, when I couldn't get the serial code I purchased working on the Linux partition, they informed me that I'd have to pay extra to get a Linux serial number.
In light of that experience, and especially now that Mozilla has both of those features, I don't recommend Opera to anyone.
If the Opera people can't be extra nice to the (maybe) 1% of people who actually buy it instead of leaving it with ads or entering a serial number found on the internet, they don't have their priorities straight..
Yes, there was an installer, but they didn't put it at the root of the directory. Small token of appreciation, but they said it was to show their support of Linux this time around.
It is in the root of the cdrom directory.
I have had the CD's since November, 2002 and just checked.
Do you mean that the installer wasn't on Disc 1?
He confronted her and she confessed to using his account. She was an experienced typist and claimed that she could figure out what he was typing by listening to the keystrokes a few times.
I had a friend in high school that claimed he could translate tty-38 typing even with the high background noise level those machines made in the computing rooms.
He demonstrated this by falsely calling in for support and writing down username/password combinations when the techs would show up and use their remote passwords. He'd then gain access to those accounts and snoop around for access to other accounts & systems. We watched him do it. Unless he was tricking us by using user/passwords he already knew, he really could hear it.
We thought he was really cool until he gained accessed to something he shouldn't and MIB came for him.
From the article.
"At the Baja Beach Club, Tuesdays are VeriChip implantation days. Stop in and a ''nurse'' -- the club's word -- uses a syringe to inject a VeriChip capsule under your skin.."
Does this "nurse" know much about "HIV" & "Hepatitis"?
Yes, but the thing that you are not considering is that probably 75% the slashdot effect is just people looking at the link for about 5 seconds, and then closing the page and moving on the the next story.
The other 25% is us looking at a page for 5 seconds and then replying because as everyone knows here, it's much more entertaining to reply without RTFA.
People read blogs because it either a.) Validates their thinking (my guess: 95%), or b.) Offers an opportunity to challenge their current ways of thinking, and an avenue to respond to the opportunity (again my guess: less than 5%). Remember, blogs are usually heavily biased, so the people that read the blogs often enough to see every post probably agree with the author. Are not both stories and comments on /. heavily biased?
Actually, there's also the silent majority to be taken into account also.
There's always a bunch of people who just like to watch out of curiosity. Or, the site keeps up on things that they are interested in. Most people aren't bold, so they don't post.
It would be interesting to see the # of people who read replies vs the # of people who read AND reply.
If the ratio is anything like USENET, I would be surprised if 1 out of 100 readers post something on any given day.
Something to back that up without statistics: Notice that sites often get slashdotted and stay that way before 10 replies have been posted.
Not only that, it was the first game (or so Epic claims) to have an Linux install script right at the root of the disc, and a Penguin right alongside the Windows and Mac logo on the box. It was a small gesture, but I remember reading one of the creators saying "We thought it'd be cool."
The UT2003 disc set had the Linux client installer also.
There's a great quote from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails to the effect that he would have released a couple of more albums if it hadn't been for Doom.
I don't understand that.
After all, remix releases shouldn't take up too much time.
I have a gfx 5200 with 128 megs ram, it cant play anything with any sort of detail and I'm left scratching my head as to why they'd bother putting that much RAM on, I'd glady sacrifice 64megs of VRAM for a GPU with a little balls. I have an old 64meg Radeon VIVO that runs circles around it in many games.
It's all about fooling the average consumer by having '128' vs '64' on the box'.
They added too much ram because people tend to think that size is what matters. Since there aren't benchmarks on the box, manufacturers know that people will choose by size.
I play halo almost every other night with all my friends, we set up 2 tvs and have probably 8 people getting together to play it. We always play Capture the Flag on blood gulch and I hope they have something similar in halo 2. Plus the new guns in halo2 dont look so hot, give me the regular pistol anyday. Anyone Know why halo 2 is taking so long?
Yes. It's because they're embarrassed that most Halo players only have 8 friends.
James Bond faked fingerprints in this movie by attaching thin fake prints to his fingers. Maybe not quite possible back in the 70's but not so far-fetched today.
A lot of people were using facial lotions in the 1970's that hardened after a short while and was then peeled off so the person could clean their pores and get rid of dead skin cells. It's still in use, but it isn't the fad it was back then.
That Bond trick took into account the fact that many people of that time were familiar with the masking lotion. People who used it couldn't avoid seeing that when it was removed, a perfect impression of their facial lines were in the mask. Audiences wouldn't have to make much of a leap to understand that making an impression on the outside of such a substance would be rather easy..
That method would still work well to this day, but it relies on the person taking the prints not being there to examine the fingers themselves.
AOL CD's don't rot. What gives?